


Darkstalker

by Foxie



Category: Darkwar
Genre: Gen, Rare Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 22:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/398899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxie/pseuds/Foxie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The silth are a myth few believe in any more.  The tradermale Brethren rule meth society, still subservient to the advanced technologies of the humans.</p><p>A young pup is rescued from her Packfast in the Upper Ponath, a pup who sees a world of ghosts the fragmented, secret Community struggling to preserve silth knowledge don't believe in any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkstalker

It is said that Marika the Doomstalker destroyed the silth, that ancient sisterhood of sorceresses, and lead the humans into the power vacuum she created. It is said that she was born into a world where meth lived in cities of stone, where only the highest orders of the silth Communities walked among the stars, where the female sorceresses kept order and the tradermales begged for scraps from their tables. It is said that the world Marika the Doomstalker was born into had nothing but the moons in the sky, no one but the meth on the ground. And it is said that it was Marika the Doomstalker who built the vast orbital mirrors and banished the night, that it was Marika the Doomstalker who first made contact with the humans, that was Marika the Doomstalker who united meth society and turned the world against the silth, and into the arms of the tradermales.

It is said that the world Marika the Doomstalker walked was thousands of years younger, and that she died with the last of the silth. That she took her own life rather than watch the slow death of the silth, and that her vacuum-mummified body still stands on the tip of her dagger-shaped darkship, drifting in the space between stars.

All this is said by the young and the foolish. These are the stories whispered into the ears of unruly pups, Marika’s shadow the substance of the long-banished night, her name a compound of everything meth have been taught to fear. “Keep at your work, or Marika will get you,” the tradermales tell their workers. “Watch your tongue, or Marika will hear,” the humans say.

In clandestine meetings where like-minded meth gather to daydream, to explore a world all reason demanded they leave behind with their undeveloped, gender-neutral pup-bodies, where they talk about the Old Ways and Old Magics and lament the wilful blindness of their times, it is said that when the race of meth have fallen into their darkest hour she will come out of the great void with her witch signs shining, her bloodfeud dyes fresh, and her old rifle newly oiled. The sisters of that secret Community tell each other, “the enemies of the meth will be swept away before Marika the Doomstalker.”

  


~*~

  


“All-damned mongrel savages.”

The clerk looked back down at his desk, stamped a piece of paper, entered something into his computer, and passed the paper through the hole in the protective screen. Maryll stared at it without seeing.

Three days. Three days ago, the Huntresses attacked her Packfast.

There was no reason for it. Their land had been stripped of petroleum and uranium thousands of years ago, only the dead dust of industry past left behind. They scraped a pathetic living, hoarding what vegetables they could save from their stomachs and leaving their sick and old to the ravages of the winter when the north wind howled and the Grauken in their stomachs answered. If it wasn’t for human charity and tradermale pity, those long winter nights would never lift and the Upper Ponath would be an abandoned wasteland.

There was no reason for the Huntresses to attack them, no reason other than they were unable to defend themselves. Other than the tithe they paid to the tradermale Brethren for so-called protection.

Help had arrived two hours too late, and rescue party had eventually pulled Maryll out of the piles of dead. It was the only place she could hide, in the blood and gore of her pack. Officials passed her from cold, grey office to cold, grey office and kept using words like trauma, PTSD, savage.

None of them made the ghosts go away.

“Hey!” The clerk rapped the screen with his knuckles and pointed at the paper. Maryll watched as a paw reached out and took it. She was shocked to feel the paper in her fingers, to realise that it was her who had taken it. A ghost drifted through the wall behind the clerk, stopped, turned right and drifted out the room. Maryll thought she saw the shape of a meth in it.

A paw took firm hold of her shoulders and guided her away.

“All-damned mongrels,” the clerk muttered. “In-breeding’s made them all crazy.”

  


~*~

  


The mirrors had been orbiting above Pon-Meth for so long the humans claimed they had built them, the Brethren claimed it had been their work and no one could tease the truth from the self-mythologising. Without them, Pon-Meth would have become a frozen, dead world millenia ago as the interstellar dust shredded light from the star before it could reach the planet. Maintainance stations had been built on the rear side of the mirrors, functional places for people to sleep between polishing the mirror or fixing holes from micro-collisions.

The world turned beneath Maryll and she stared at it in breathless wonder. It was so vast, more than she could have possibly imagined. And yet, Pon-Meth, the meth homeworld, was just one planet. One among hundreds. The humans had taken meth and spread them among the stars, every human world eager for the cheap labour. When the two species had first met, the meth had no way to travel between the stars. Legends told of silth who could use their Touch to hop between stars with nothing more than their minds and a platform to stand on. But legends were full of nonsense.

Humans brought hyperspace technology to Pon-Meth. No meth travelled the stars without human intervention. For a time, it had been fashionable for wealthy humans to keep meth as they would dogs, to show off their strange, furry pet alien to the great and good. But the novelty had worn off and the Brethren had slowly taken back control of meth migration and labour, until the humans left all meth affairs to them, quietly glad to be relieved of the burden of caring.

Maryll pressed her fingers against the window and her breath fogged the view as she pressed her muzzle to the barrier between her and the vacuum of space. The outline of vast cities moved slowly beneath her, of impossibly long stretches of road and bridges that forded violent and capricious rivers. Airships slowly drifted through the clouds and planes left long vapour trails as they sped from city to city. Over one billion people. Maryll couldn’t imagine so many. Her Packfast had been home to a few dozen meth. She had seen tradermale caravans and human aid workers pass through, each selling seeds and ploughs in their own way. But they were small parties, no more than twenty or thirty at a time.

One billion people.

Something grabbed hold of her shoulder and her feet slipped and legs struggled to keep her upright. She kicked her own ankle and sprawled across the floor.

“I’m not paying you to day dream!”

Maryll rearranged herself until she rested on her paws and knees. The familiar smooth, liquid voice of her employer washed over her. She felt it like the blast from a bellows on the smouldering hatred inside her.

She turned, and stared at Spencer. She stared _through_ Spencer. He was nothing but an insubstantial outline, a translucent shape, all his colour drained. Ghosts moved around her, drifting or marching as if they couldn't see the world around them. Spencer’s heart stood out, a throbbing red ruby hovering in his chest. She could almost reach out and take hold of it...

“I said get back to work!”

His familiar voice snapped Maryll back to mundane reality. She blinked. Spencer seemed less substantial now than he had when he was a ghost.

She pulled herself to her feet and made her way across the room, back to her mop and bucket. Spencer shook his head, and left. The female meth who had been hovering in the doorway hovered a few moments more, an official red binder held across her chest. She looked odd in her Terran-style business suit, fur poking haphazardly from the cuffs and collar. Maryll glanced up at her, and lifted her lips in a silent growl. The suited female watched a few moments more, nodded to herself, and left.

  


~*~

  


Two years passed. Maryll never left the station. She swept floors, mopped, cleaned with abrasive chemicals that left her fur brittle and split. Spencer had been charged with civilising her, breeding the Ponath out and replacing it with the human. When he taught her to read, he stood over her with a riding crop and slapped her muzzle when mispronounced the words. When he taught her arithmetic, they gambled with her meal allowance and down time. He was a man out of his depth, a small man who wanted a small life with as little responsibility as possible.

Catell, his secretary, let slip that he had a wife and children on some distant world. Another responsibility he didn't want.

He floundered, drowning under the weight of Maryll’s education and he pulled her down with him. For the first six months, Maryll fought back. And then she stopped fighting him. Spencer didn’t change. Nothing Maryll did had any affect on him.

He wasn’t a bad man, just a small man.

The physical abuse he subjected her to was illegal. If Maryll reported him, he would be stripped of his position, fined, jailed. But that would mean admitting that he’d pushed her beyond her ability to cope. That would mean admitting that he was, in some way, stronger than her. That he'd won a victory over her. And Maryll wouldn’t allow a human male that power over her.

She spent all the time she could in the dry food store three floors beneath her room. The store room had originally been designed as living quarters, and Maryll sat on an empty shelf and stared out into space for hours. The mirrors kept Pon-Meth in perpetual day time. She had never seen the stars before. She had never seen Pon-Meth’s moons. Every morning for those two years, the sight of the sunlight running over the curve of Pon-Meth’s horizon awed her.

  


~*~

  


“That’s just savage superstition and nonsense,” Catell growled. “Nearly everything in the old texts is. It took our greatest scholars over a thousand years to sift out the few grains of truth. Countless silth were executed for even admitting the texts existed.”

Maryll sat on the floor, legs crossed, while Catell paced behind her. It was rare indeed that a meth with Potential was born these days, and rarer still she was not quickly convinced to dismiss her nascent ability as pupish imaginings. It seemed the work of some greater power that Catell should happen to cross paths with Maryll. Maryll’s time as a bureaucratic nuisance had ended when she’d be foisted on Spencer, a human who just happened to have a member of the secret silth Community as a secretary.

Although, Maryll was beginning to believe that ‘silth’ was too generous a word. The sisterhood practiced in paranoid secrecy, and when the talked they pontificated about sympathetically harmonised electromagnetic fields and collapsing the wave functions of unobserved quanta. The belief in the Community was that the trauma of losing her Packfast had created a schism in Maryll’s mind, causing her subconscious to perceive the e-m fields as ‘ghosts’.

The Community had one text they treasured above all. According to the stories, Markia the Doomstalker had tutored the last of the dark-faring silth--those silth who could hop between stars with nothing more than their minds--while in exile on the ancient human ship that had been her home after she left Pon-Meth. One of her students had recorded the lessons. Almost five millennia removed in time, the Community held a faithful copy close to their breast.

Catell had an electronic copy and read parts to Maryll. She hoped the embarrassingly primitive beliefs would shock Maryll into sense, into abandoning her fixation on those-who-dwell. All it had done was make her conviction stronger.

“Look,” Catell said. She stopped pacing and rubbed her temples. “Darkwalkers are a myth. There’s no more to those-who-dwell--your ‘ghosts’--then there is to rabbits and kropek pups see in the clouds. Darkwalkers were born out of a misconception about the nature of meth ability to perceive and manipulate certain bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is physics, Maryll. There is no 'dark side', and no 'light side'. There is the presence of energy, or its absence. Until you accept this very basic premise, you are not going to be able to develop your abilities. Now, pup, the telescreen. Focus on it. Feel the electromagentic field that it generates. Open up your sixth sense without trying to contextualise it.”

“Where is the organ that receives the electromagnetic signals, mistress?”

Catell spun around and stared at the young pup. “What?”

“As it is simply another sense, it must have an organ, mustn't it? Like smell has the nose, sight has the eyes...” Maryll was needling, pushing to see how far she could go. She knew the old silth had no answer. It had taken a year for Catell to decide Maryll could be trusted, and six months of patient tutoring had almost convinced the old silth the pup was too wild to be of any use.

A paw slammed against Maryll's ears and Catell growled. Maryll bit her tongue, but didn't give her teacher the satisfaction of flinching.

“Concentrate on the screen,” Catell growled.

Maryll stared at the blank screen, and saw her own dim reflection. She took a slow breath and went through the simple mental calming exercises she'd been taught.

Learning to control the ghosts was important. Until she did, she was a slave. A slave to Spencer, a slave to Catell and her secret sisterhood.

She forced her mind back to her Packfast. To the smell of wood and flesh as it burned, to the taste of mud and blood as she hid among the dead, to the sounds of the Huntresses howling their victory to the still air. She found that bared door in her mind and beat at it with all the force she could find. She flung her thoughts and feelings against it like a machine gun wearing through body armour. A crack appeared, a tiny glimpse of light, and she dived through it.

Away from the pull of the atmosphere, the ghosts were bigger. They drifted in grotesque parodies of meth shapes. She found one, the smallest one she could, and fixed on it. She willed it. She extended her desire like an arm, and caught it around the throat.

It fought. Maryll held on, forcing her will over its. Slowly, it acquiesced.

She slipped it gently into the telescreen, teased it into long, thin strands which ran through the wires and the transistors soldered onto its motherboard.

An image appeared on the screen in front of her. A picture of her own face, lips curled in a grin of triumph. She turned, and savoured Catell's expression.

Collapsing wave-functions didn't explain what she'd just done. What she'd just done was, Catell had insisted, impossible. But Maryll had never doubted.

  


~*~

  


“How in the name of the All did the Huntresses get attack ships?”

Spencer dashed around his quarters, throwing things into a bag open on his bed. Maryll watched him coolly. Another explosion rocked the station, the vibrations rolling through the ancient metal and emptying Spencer's bag over the floor. A piercing alarm started to wail.

“They've boarded?!”

Spencer stopped collecting his life from the floor and stared up at nothing. Maryll could smell the urine and sweat on his skin, the scent of unrestrained panic. Human males were almost as prone to it as meth males were. Brethren ran though the corridors behind her, desperate to escape. Men ran into them and pushed them aside.

“Fuck it.” Spencer snatched up his bag, shut it, and headed to the door. Maryll didn't move. “Get out the way, mutt!”

He grabbed her shoulder and started to push, but Maryll took hold of his wrist and growled. She remembered the smell of blood and the howl of the Huntresses and found the doorway in her mind. Spencer's flesh dissolved. He became a pale outline, the shadow of an x-ray, his ruby-red heart beating hard and fast in his chest.

“It's your time, human,” Maryll said. She couldn't keep the smile, the satisfaction out of her voice. She reached out, took hold of the ruby in his chest, and squeezed.

Spencer let out a short shriek, and fell to the floor.

Maryll took his pistol from where it had fallen onto the floor, and fired two shots into his chest. Let them think the Huntresses killed him. Manipulating electromagnetic fields didn't allow you to kill someone. She wasn't ready to let others know what she could do yet.

She slipped the pistol into her belt and calmly walked through the corridors. Brethren and men ran around her like water around a rock in a river. She felt their panic, their fear, their faint hope. It filled the space around her like white noise on a broken radio.

“Thank the All!”

Catell took hold of Maryll's wrist without breaking step and tried to drag her along.

Maryll slipped out of Catell's paws and stopped. She watched the old silth.

“You're panicking like a tradermale,” Maryll said. “I can smell the fear on you.”

Catell turned, and stared at Maryll.

“The Huntresses are destroying the station,” Catell said. “And we're on the station. If we don't get off now, they are going to destroy us, too.”

Maryll started to walk again, a slow and dignified pace that forced Catell to follow.

“Where are we going?”

“There's a small pod,” Catell said. Her ears were flat, the traces of panic not quite hidden in her voice. “It should be enough to allow us to get to the surface. If we get there before we're both killed.”

“Why would the Huntresses attack here?”

“Because you're here,” Catell spat. “First your Packfast, now here. Maybe there's more of Marika about you than I thought.”

Maryll bit down on her anger. She could see Catell's heart beating in her chest. She could easily...

No. She still needed the old silth. If she wanted any chance to contact the Community on the planet's surface, she needed her.

“This station is the last inhabited outpost before the greater orbital mirror,” Catell said. “When they've destroyed it, they'll have half-an-hour to destroy the mirror before any counter-attack can be launched.”

“Do they really want to destroy the mirror?”

Catell didn't answer. She stared ahead, ploughing through the sea of males.

Maryll slipped through her doorway, extended her Touch to the ships outside. She felt the fear and anger of the Huntresses, the death of the people on the station, the swarming of the ghosts as gathered for the inevitable.

Yes. Yes, they really wanted to destroy the mirror. It would plunge half the planet into darkness. Into a darkness not seen since the time of the silth. But why?

“Because they're rabid,” Catell said when she asked. “They want to kill us all to return to some glorious golden age when psychotic huntresses ruled by brute force. To 'purify' the meth race and purge outside influences.”

Maryll stopped. “That doesn't explain why they destroyed my Packfast.”

Catell grabbed her by the wrist and pulled before she could resist. “Save it for when we're safe.”

  


~*~

  


Maryll stood on the banks of a river in some unknown southern land and watched the streaks of fire as tonnes of metal burned in the atmosphere. The greater mirror fell to Pon-Meth in a thousand fragments and burned to nothing but smoke and light.

She stared in wonder, unable to articulate what she felt. She watched tears roll down the face of the All.

“I got a burst of static, but I can't get a clear signal.”

She turned, and stared down at Catell, hunched over her radio and desperate to coax life out of it.

“I can't find the Community.”

“What can we do to find them, mistress?”

Catell sighed, and slumped. She was giving up already?

“Now we wander around the forest until the Grauken finds us.”

Maryll lifted her lips in a silent snarl. Were all the Community as prone to male cowardice as Catell? Little wonder all their centuries of study had produced was the occasional broken telescreen.

So small, Catell was so small. Just like Spencer, just like all those males on the station who moved paperwork around between cups of coffee. Just like the Brethren who fought and scrambled to maintain the status quo, just like the humans who beat their chests and squabbled over every scrap of power and money, just like...

Maryll breathed slowly and focused on the cool night air brushing the tip of her nose as she inhaled. She focused on the cool, dry patch it left on the roof of her mouth as she exhaled. She felt the cold air moving between the blades of her fur, the damp ground seeping through her clothes. Her thoughts slowed, and as soon as she could Maryll snatched them and held them tight. She closed her fist and they slowly dissolved.

She opened her eyes. Her mind was still, her thoughts hers again.

For the first time in almost five-thousand years, night was falling on Pon-Meth.

Maryll closed her eyes, and found her trapdoor. She slipped through and let herself slowly dissipate over the land of the ghosts. She pushed herself in every direction, expanding her sense of self until it reached beyond the forest, along the river's course, through the new-born night and until it found something, something that startled at her touch. She tasted it, inhaled its scent. At the back of her throat, a taste like Catell. She came back to herself, and started walking.

“Hey!” Catell called. “Where are you going? Don't walk off or I'll lose you in this... this _night_.”

A moment more, and Catell had pulled herself to her feet and walked alongside the young pup.

“It scares you,” Maryll said. “The night. I can smell it on you, like a male being charged by a wild animal. You're not silth.”

Catell almost choked. She stopped in-front of Maryll, a long, low growl rolling out her throat. Maryll stopped.

“No silth would be scared of the night,” she said. She pulled the hood of her cloak over her head. “The night is the time of the silth. It's time they remembered that.”

  


~*~

  


Somewhere, on the edges of some distant star system, Marika the Doomstalker stands on the point of her dagger-like darkship. She leans forwards slightly as if braced against an invisible breeze. The convection currents her body heat makes in the bubble of atmosphere her Touch creates around the darkship ripple the folds of her black cloak. The distant starlight catches on the metal of the rifle slung across her back.

On the left arm of the darkship, Grauel sits. One leg hangs over the edge, dangling over infinity. The old huntress slowly, methodically, polishes her rifle. Barlog sits opposite her, on the darkship’s right arm. She sits tight, anxious, as if waiting for something. As if she's been waiting for millenia.

Slowly, uncertain of his step and terrified of falling, Bagnel rises from his place at the centre of the ship, and inches out towards Marika. He stops two feet short of her.

“This looks...” he says.

“The dust cloud,” Marika says.

“I didn't think we'd see it again.”

Marika turns, and watches the tradermale carefully. “I've warned you before, male, don't underestimate me.” Her ears are cocked in an expression of amusement, something her humanized descendants on Pon-Meth might call a _smirk_. “I found you.”

Bagnel doesn't say anything. They've spent so long in the Up-and-Over, hopping from alien system to alien system, he's lost track of... Of almost everything. Of time, of place. Of who he is, or was. He has strange feelings, the odd sensation he can't articulate even in the privacy of his own mind. It's as if he remembers dying. But then, he wouldn't be here...

“There,” Marika points. Bagnel tries to pick out the inconsequential spot the silth has seen. He doesn't see it.

“Just more stars.”

“Home,” Marika corrects him. “For you, at least.”

“Is it..?”

“The meth homeworld is beginning to come out the other side of the dust cloud.”

Marika walks easily around Bagnel, and sits at the centre of the ship.

Dead? Who can be dead when the shadow they cast is so long?

“So are we going back?”

Marika shakes her head. “Not yet. They're not ready for Marika yet. But soon.”

Bagnel gives up, and sits.

“One of these days, I might even grow to understand you.”

Something pulls at Marika, something from that almost-invisible dot in the dust. She can see the shreds of her mirror burning as they fall to the ground. She reaches out, gathers a flock of ghosts and presses them to her ship. A simple squeeze will take them into the Up-and-Over, and the ghosts will carry them back to Pon-Meth.

Soon. Very soon.

  


~** end **~

  



End file.
